WORLD >FIFA names first woman in board

FIFA co-opted a woman to its executive committee for the first time yesterday and continued its reform process by pressing ahead with changes to its ethics committee.

Lydia Nsekera, the president of the Burundi Football Association, will be installed as the co-opted executive committee member at the 62nd FIFA Congress this week with the formal election of a woman on the committee to follow at next year’s Congress, soccer’s governing body said in a statement.

Nsekera, 45, is a member of the women’s football and the women’s World Cup committees and is also on the organising committee for the Olympic Football Tournaments having been part of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) since 2009.

FIFA also confirmed its ethics committee is being restructured with a new system involving two committees to be established - one to investigate matters and the other to adjudicate on them. An announcement on who would lead the committees had been expected on Tuesday but one of the candidates was ill so it was deferred.

“In view of this, the executive committee decided to hold an extraordinary meeting to designate both chairmen together once the FIFA Congress has approved the relevant amendments to the FIFA Statutes, which will come into force 60 days after the Congress,” a FIFA statement said.

The meeting will take place in Zurich in the first week of July when the new Code of Ethics is adopted and both chairmen will be named.

There was no such delay for Domenico Scala, a Swiss-Italian business executive, who was appointed as the independent chairman of FIFA’s Audit and Compliance Committee, with the appointment to be ratified at Congress.

In other matters, FIFA said its players’ insurance programme was being extended to cover the Olympic tournament.

It also named six cities to host next year’s Confederations Cup in Brazil, the warm-up tournament for the 2014 World Cup finals.

Brasilia, Belo Horizonte, Fortaleza, Rio de Janeiro, Recife, and Salvador have been approved as venues, but FIFA said it has contingency plans and match schedules in place based on only four or five cities being fit to host games because of continued worries over stadium rebuilding.

Kosovo also took a major step towards full membership of FIFA with other nations given approval to play friendlies against the eastern European nation.